These low prices are cost savings that we pass directly onto our customers; they come from the reduced energy prices that we pay in Finland compared to Germany, and also come from the colder climate and lower cooling requirements
This is basically due to Google probably rightly believing that electricity price in Finland is going up due to all these datacenters and also a pr stunt that the current government loves because they can claim that they aren't allowing these datacenters to raise electricity price.
This isn't investing in power infrastructure in any way, there is no reality where that nuclear plant wasn't staying in operation as long as they can possibly keep it running in the foreseeable future. Basically only way Google and Fortum will be building new nuclear capacity is by Finland promising to cover any electricity price below 15 cents per kWh in the market.
What it does allow is for Google and the governemt to say these data centres aren’t generating any co2
Of course everyone’s else’s co2 emissions then increase instead.
The only solution is more zero co2 emissions. Google could have funded large wind farms, or a new nuclear plant, or grid connections to other locations. But that would cost more.
Only if demand increases to the point where supply cannot meet demand in a short enough time frame. Capacity is a factor here.
You buying a doughnut - even half the doughnuts - from a doughnut shop does not increase the price of the remaining doughnuts unless they can't make enough to satisfy remaining demand and people are willing to outbid you rather than wait.
Does that power station have enough capacity to satisfy the remaining demand?
At least Sweden is struggling a lot with scaling its power production, to the point where it's a problem for existing and new industries and causing some rather extreme price volatility.
A lot of the green energy is from hydro dams and you can't really add new rivers to the geography to support additional industry.
With hindsight, it wasn't a very good idea to shut down 6 of 12 nuclear reactors. Still much better than the situation in Germany, but that's a very low bar.
It will be interesting to see how the Rolls-Royce SMR project works out. Since it appears to be impossible to build anything cheaply in the UK, this will be the real test.
> Since it appears to be impossible to build anything cheaply in the UK
The solution is to build nuclear power stations on ships in China, then sail them to the UK and plug them in.
If power prices elsewhere in the world become advantageous, sail them elsewhere and plug them in there.
You still have the interconnection costs, but seaside places sometimes have high voltage connections for existing or historic power plants (who themselves are water cooled)
A Chinese nuke on the coast of Britain might be hard politically. Even if it's benign, you can bet the US will run an expensive campaign to discredit it in public opinion.
There's a special line crossed by a 100% Chinese owned floating nuclear power plant, as opposed to a 24% Chinese owned fixed in place nuclear power plant like the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station?
You wouldn't even need it to be Chinese owned. Just Chinese built and indemnified. Hell, I'd take a guarantee from a consortium of Chinese SoE banks over the U.S. government today. (I'm American.)
The government that keeps rejecting offshore wind for bogus security reasons is probably a bigger factor.
Those wind farms would have connected into the zones with the highest prices.
They've rejected an amount that would generate more than the entire grid usage. Or way more than double what the cheap zones generate from their 2/3rds hydro and 1/3rd wind.
>you can't really add new rivers to the geography to support additional industry.
yes, you can - with all those fiords surrounded by mountains you can use excess wind/solar (your own as well as German, etc.) and pump water up a dammed fiord to generate the electricity later when no cheap excess available.
This assumes that there is excess power at some point. This will soon become unrealistic: we either need power for data centers during the day or charging vehicles during the night.
The solution works only to keep a steady production of electricity, but if the demand would require full output all the time then these "mechanical batteries" don't help.
Here in Norway we already have issues with volatile and high electricity prices, because:
1) We're not expanding hydropower generation very much. We can upgrade existing dams for improved efficiency, but no new dams are being planned, because it's politically and environmentally arduous to do so. There's some wind buildout, but that's also a political quagmire due to nimbyism. Nuclear isn't even close to having a political consensus behind it, and even if it did, it would take years. And our geography is uniquely ill suited for solar.
2) Winters have less and less snow, summers have less and less rain, leading to issues filling reservoirs. This will only get worse in the future.
3) The north has a surplus, but the infrastructure for transferring it to the south is underdeveloped
4) lots of the electricity we generate is being sold to central Europe to compensate for Germany's idiotic decision to shut down their nuclear reactors and Trump's idiotic decision to send oil prices over $100
Unfortunately data centres are currently being built, which depresses me. Because who will use them? Giant American tech companies will use them, to lobotomise our youth, poison our political discourse and steal our personal data. Fuck that.
Data centres also create very few jobs beyond the initial construction phase. Overall it's a very, very bad deal for Norway as a nation.
Germany became a net electricity importer after shutting down its final nuclear power plants in 2023.
On top of that, heating still runs mostly on gas, which won't be fun this winter. Due to the inefficiency of gas heating, there will be less gas available for Germany's gas power plants.
Now imagine if Germany's dream of hydrogen vehicles, where most hydrogen comes from gas, also became a reality...
> As part of the deal, Google signed a 22-year contract with Finnish utility Fortum to buy up to 50% of the output from the Loviisa nuclear power plant.
> Finland has emerged as an attractive location for data centres because of its cool climate, plentiful low-carbon electricity and relatively uncongested power grid.
I hope the data center's waste heat can be used for some form of district heating! Finland has pretty great municipal infrastructure, but I don't know enough about its heating systems.
The new planned datacenters aren't near major population centers, so potential for district heating might be limited. Eyeballing from the map one of them is about has about 25 km from Oulu (pop 200k), and another is 30 km from Kajaani (30k). But that's about it.
Edit: I was wrong, the locations do have small (5-10 MW) district heating networks.
there are some papers about communal gardens heated by data centers... since they don't produce as much there, hope it also paves the way for developing indoor agriculture
For those regions green house and barn heating is a major cost (to the point that Norway for example subsidizes barn heating for dairy farmers), while pretty much all the energy consumed by a datacenter goes straight to heat without any meaningful work (in thermodynamic sense) done, so it sounds like a good match.
One can imagine the saunas the guys will have there :)
On the main point - there are persistent leaks/rumors that one of the main points of the Trump's envoys (Kushner and Witkoff) to Putin is building data centers in Karelia ( the Russian side of Finland border) - the same reasons of cheap electricity and plentiful of cool water.
When Google was going hard on deploying renewables they stressed "additionality".
They didn't want to just buy clean hydro that already existed, or renewables that were going to get built anyway without their money, they wanted to be sure that their investment was growing the amount of clean energy available.
I'm hoping they have some justification like this for buying existing nuclear. They appear to be claiming that it would shut if they didn't pay in advance.
A similar deal by Amazon got shot down in America because the regulators realised it was shifting costs onto other grid users.
You'd assume that Finnish regulators are better than American regulators, but I’d like to see some evidence of that.
The (naive or forward thinking depending on your opinion) is that cheaper 'inference' will result in more demand, like the more efficient Watt steam engine increasing consumption of coal.
Energy usage for computing by humanity will only go up with time. It should be obvious that most of our energy will go to computing for anyone who's worked with computers. At some point you exhaust the kinds of things you can do in the physical world, but you can compute infinitely. There's limits to where you can go but not to what you can think about.
It’s crazy that Google and TikTok, which mainly produce consumer software to serve ads, have grown to the scale where they literally need to set up data centres in northern countries while getting their power from nuclear power plants.
> Google will build new data centres in Kajaani, Muhos and Vaala
Wow, these are really far north. I checked on Google Maps: They are all about as far north as Oulu. It must get incredibly cold during the winter. Wiki tells me the region is at or below freezing for about six to seven months per year! I am curious how much cheaper is cooling in these locations compared to more temperate climates in continental Europe.
Nuclear power plants are notorious for their long planning, approval and build times (and cost overruns). Then again, I wouldn't want to live near a nuclear power plant built as fast as a data center either...
Finland they made a few mistakes by becoming overly dependent on Russian reactor designs Russian sourced fuel for those reactors. Relations with Russia are a bit strained (especially recently, but they were always complex). Luckily, the wind sector is booming in Finland in recent years. They have a lot of on-shore capacity.
A lot of reactors in the US are similarly dependent on Russia for uranium enrichment and supplies. Some of that dependency relates to post cold war era treaties (now cancelled because of the strained relationship with Russia) for Russia to decommission its nuclear weaponry and to help Russia economically.
The Loviisa plant actually predates the end of the cold war but Finland at the time was not part of NATO and the relationship with the Soviet Union was very complicated given that they had fought an ugly war in WW II that ended up with the Soviet Union taking a large chunk of Finnish territory. The Loviisa plant ended up built during what is now seen as the definitely very chilly phase of the cold war (under Brezhnev).
And then Finland repeated the mistake with their more recent nuclear additions.
I am not against AI data centers. But it's a good thing that the electricity infrastructure expenditures for AI data centers' consumption are paid by the companies making money from AI training and inference, rather than being paid by all taxpayers collectively.
Not sure if this particular project is also sponsored by taxpayers' money or not, though.
If a community's usage is say 60% of what a plant can produce, and $TECH_GIANT comes and buys the other 40%, what happens next?
Power prices will go up, since any growth will exceed the available power generation capacity. Power will become dirtier, since diesel generators will fill in when there is high demand. Then the community will spend a huge amount of money building out more capacity.
I think we will all soon see, communities sharing power infrastructure with massive-demand corporate customers will end badly for the communities.
I would go even further to say if we can get zero taxpayer dollars in funding, fair and equitable land costs, infrastructure paid for by the companies, and solid ecological plans that are leveraged on threat of removal (not fines), they could be a net good where they are built
Should this apply only to AI compute facilities or all industries?
I have no real evidence for this but I think a general principle of good governance is that the policy is agnostic to the industries which it affects and robust under any set of conditions, so for instance, the price that electric utilities charge should be enough to pay for expansions, either prospectively or retroactively (via loans secured before the construction, taken out against projected future revenue), rather than subsidizing the expansion with taxes collected by industries that won't be using the electricity, or exercising discretionary control over which types of industrial expansion are accommodated through investments in expanding the energy infrastructure.
Huge expansions of energy production have occurred in the past to meet growing demand for energy from then-emerging industries. And I'm not aware of any past campaigns to stop the various industries that needed energy on account of the allegation that their increase in energy usage would burden other sectors of society. I have concern that the treatment of AI compute facilities is based on public opinion rather than rule of law and consistent protection of private property rights.
So, the problem in this case is that there's no gain for the country building the datacentre.
If you're in Finland and there are two possible uses for electricity production, let's say, either a steel plant or a datacentre. The steel plant will employ a bunch of people locally. A datacentre will employ a bunch of people in California.
So if you are to build a datacentre, the deal must necessarily be that the R&D for the models that are to run on it must happen locally. Otherwise there's no reason to give them the allocation over the steel plant.
Okay, that is a fair argument, but the policy that that argument inspires should be implemented in a more agnostic way. There should be some objective measure of "positive economic externalities generated per megawatt of electricity consumed". And projects should be judged on that basis, with projects below a certain threshold either being disallowed or being forced to pay more per megawatt of power consumed on that basis. It shouldn't just be based on some vague intuition, that is largely a product of the virality of the arguments that circulate on social media platforms (like this one).
I'd err on the side of allowing development until a proper regulatory process can be implemented or unless there's a concrete reason to prevent it. If allocating scarce electricity resources to an AI-compete facility prevents the building of a steel plant, that would be a reason worth considering it. But there would need to be a concrete trade-off, not just a default assumption that the effect is net negative on account of the industry that the project falls under.
More generally, the bias is to block development until safety/fairness issues are addressed, but it shouldn't be in my opinion, because that overlooks the risk of inaction.
When development is blocked, what that does is reduce visible risks. What it usually increases however is total risk. We are already under constant threat from deterioration: aging, depreciation and decay. Entropy is the default. Action is what pushes back against it.
We need to weigh any risks restriction prevents against the risks it leaves us less equipped to mitigate.
I think it should apply to all industries. But for many (or most?) countries where power generation is privatized in the first place, this shouldn't be a problem that we need to fix. The trickier question might be about the grid, which in most cases is publicly funded.
> I think a general principle of good governance is that the policy is agnostic to the industries which it affects and robust under any set of conditions
The trouble with this is that people frequently don't like the consequences of that.
For example, a lot of the costs of a grid connection are non-linear if not totally independent of the amount of power you use. When a tree falls on a power line and a crew has to show up and install a new pole, the cost of that has nothing to do with the average percent utilization of those wires. Likewise, a line that can deliver 100MW to a single customer costs more than one that can handle 100kW, but it doesn't cost anywhere near 1000 times as much or consume 1000 times more land etc.
The result of this is that the "works under any set of conditions" pricing for a grid connection would be a flat monthly fee for the capacity of the line totally independent of how much you use, and a line with 1000 times the capacity would only cost e.g. 10 times as much. But then a typical household electric bill would have a fixed charge of ~$100/mo for a grid connection regardless of how little electricity you use.
Likewise, if you have a high proportion of renewable generation in the grid then the price per kWh during daylight hours when there are clear skies would be essentially zero, but the price on a cold still night in winter would be oppressively high and anyone who failed to turn off their electric heat on that specific day would end up with a $5000 electric bill.
So in most places what happens instead is that the power company charges a fee per kWh which is used to pay line crews and other expenses that don't actually depend on usage and then have a much lower fixed connection charge. And charge a certain amount per kWh during days when supply is sufficient and then use the money to subsidize consumption during shortfalls, even though that actually raises total costs, because otherwise people would scream about prices hitting $500/kWh for a few hours every year or two.
But once you're doing those things, a customer that wants megawatts of power is reasonably going to object to that rate structure, because the few percent inefficiency those things induce is millions of dollars in their case. At which point people start complaining about subsidies, even though not doing those things would be the absence of subsidies.
That's a fair point, but even this kind of "exception" to the electricity tariffs (which gives the appearance of a subsidy and elicits public opposition) can be done in a more agnostic way. E.g. a 100 megawatt AI compute facility can be treated the same as a 100 megawatt aluminum smelter, can be treated the same as a 100 megawatt manufacturing plant. Large concentrated consumers of electricity can be treated differently than smaller consumers, but should all be treated the same as each other.
AI compute is a unique facility: can be placed anywhere, takes in mainly energy, does not produce the same volume or composition of waste, has noise pollution, and needs minimal access.
I am not a regulator but that feels like something that needs new rules
AI compute facilities can inspire new regulations, yes, but what I'm advocating is that those regulations should not concern whether the facility is generating AI inference or aluminum or chemicals. All it should care about is the metrics that are relevant to the community like positive externalities, and negative ones like noise pollution, industrial pollution, etc. And all uses of private property should be judged on the basis of those criteria, not what industrial category the use falls under and the generalizations that are made about that category.
My own cursory take on AI compute facilities is that they're mostly much better for the community than previous industries. They emit zero industrial pollution, and only require water for cooling and energy from any source. The water used can also be recycled. And even in the early designs that don't use recycled water, the water consumed is orders of magnitude less than agriculture.
On the downside, they produce fewer jobs, but they encourage and fund infrastructure upgrades in telecom links and power transmission, which has second-order benefits for the local economy.
And they consume very little government services, so the taxes they pay produce a much larger fiscal surplus for local governments.
They also allow for energy that would otherwise be uneconomical to harvest, to be economically harvested. Let's just take an example of a desert which has very little wildlife, and no major nearby populations. AI compute facilities can make it economical to harvest the sunlight in those regions and make economic use of it.
The principle means reasoning about the harms that you want to reduce, and the benefits you want to maximize, and designing policy thoughtfully around optimizing on those two fronts, instead of basing policy on vague generalizations about industrial categories.
The question is how much they buy. It may not be enough to keep the plant running. Google will only buy up to 50% of what the plant can produce, but the deal allows the plant to operate beyond 2030 according to the operator.
Oh god, they're actually going to directly hoover up electricity supply and cause it to get massively more expensive for us mere mortal domestic users trying to stay alive
Not everything is partisan, and land is only a small factor in where to decide to place a data centers. The top 4 out of 5 states with the most data centers are blue states.
The reason Texas is experiencing a boom in data centers is friendlier power grid policies to data centers (similar to why Google is building in Finland), in combination with (relatively small) tax incentives.
The company my brother works for (fairly small) is involved in the construction and maintenance of the electrical side of the data grid. Apparently they need to hire at least 20 people a month for the foreseeable future to keep up with demand, as they're already booked out with projects into 2030 or something like that.
Overall, it's not exactly a ton of jobs for how much money is going into them, but it isn't nothing.
> Overall, it's not exactly a ton of jobs for how much money is going into them, but it isn't nothing.
I’m not disputing that data center buildouts will have some localized job creation, but the net effect of all those data centers will be overwhelmingly negative on employment if everything the AI companies are saying is true
> Calling data centers “job creating infrastructure” seems like a bit of an oxymoron
That's your original point, which is wrong since, as you admitted, data center boom is clearly creating jobs.
If you meant those jobs are offset by the negative effect of AI in general if we believe AI companies, a study by Anthropic was actively discussed here a few days ago. TLDR: they don't believe there will be mass unemployment because of AI
“Job-creating infrastructure” would be infrastructure that creates jobs. A chamber of commerce, small business lenders, startup accelerators etc. Building infrastructure of any kind has a temporary positive effect on employment. The builder jobs have nothing to do with the purpose of the infrastructure.
I’m sure Anthropic is saying that now, but there’s no escaping the fact that they and OpenAI repeatedly harped on how it would eliminate mass amounts of jobs for years. Or the mass layoffs blamed on AI that we have already seen.
Republican south states have also decided to reject science and embrace fossil fuels - global warming shall be the problem of our grandchildren, feel free to build as many gas turbines as you wish!
Yeah I know. Sadly, burning gas and coal is still the cheapest easiest way to rapidly deploy a lot of power, and Texas is all about it.
Renewables can compete but take longer to build. Nuclear is more expensive and takes forever to build. Maybe SMRs will happen but I’m not holding my breath. It’s harder than it sounds to scale that.
SMR are a pipe dream IMO. Proper modern reactors can be built relatively quickly (see China using French designs) but our lawyer-driven system makes it impossible to build infrastructure).
Nuclear is the most expensive form of clean energy. It is likely to bankrupt at least one company.
When Finland contracted with France to build their latest reactor, they wisely had a fixed price contract where the French company would pay for const overruns. At groundbreaking in 2005, they planned for a 2009 completion. In 2016 it bankrupted Areva, with the French government owned EDG saving parts of the company crucial to the nation. It wasn't completed u tip 2023:
When the US last decided to build nuclear, Westinghouse AP1000s, two in South Carolina and two in Georgia, it resulted in the bankruptcy on Westinghouse, putting all of Toshiba, its owner, at risk:
The two South Carolina reactors were abandoned at the cost of a substantial fraction of the build cost, in the billions, and utility executives went to jail for deception about it. Georgia finished its two reactors, but only by creating some of the most expensive electricity out there today.
Storage and renewables are cheaper, faster to deploy, and work really really really well in Texas and Arizona. Despite nearly free natural gas in Texas due its state as a by-product of oil extraction, most of the new electricity grid assets in Texas are wind, storage, and solar, and that's independent third party investors making those choice in the grid to make money, as Texas has perhaps the "freest" electricity market in the United States when it comes to who is allowed to build grid assets and make money off them.
If the far north places have hydro that's already built and not being used, that makes sense for data centers. But new nuclear is not a serious technology, it exists mostly based on vibes.
This is Finland. A third of the country is above the Arctic circle. In the winter the sun barely gets above the horizon. Nuclear makes a lot of sense there.
It seems to me the main problem is we build so little of it that we don't have the people, skills, supply chains etc to do it well. China generally builds it's reactors on schedule and within budget.
A one party state where the plants are owned, insured, backstopped and cleaned up for free by the government doesn’t have the same economics as free market builds.
And even with all that their total share of nuclear is declining y/&y and projected to continue to decline. Because it’s still too expensive even for a autocracy
Perhaps the extra cost in freeze proofing certain systems and the inability to rely on evaporative cooling techniques? The availability of power in the winter might be a problem too when northern home's power and energy usage all ramp up. In the summer you need nearly the same amount of capacity for cooling as the south so there isn't much savings there.
Google claims that 10% of its power goes to non-computing overhead. Even if that were 0 somewhere else, ok how much more expensive is the power in that area, probably more than 11%. And I don't know how much they spend on power to begin with, relative to the other costs that probably go up.
Arizona is conducive to abundant solar power, so that'd be a good reason to build there. Similar deal here in Nevada (with the added bonus of Nevada being a giant blob of geothermal heat, further driving renewable energy supply and therefore datacenter attractiveness).
Which makes Arizona an interesting place to place any new builds of any sort of data center. They’ve been talking about the scarcity of resources there for years, and it’s currently in an escalating tailspin of abundance. Power is cheap as hell there, but once the water dries up… things might change quickly.
There's also a power generation water cost though!
Something like 500g/MWh for gas/coal/nuclear (~70% of power in AZ), so a huge xAI datacenter (Colossus 2, ~1 GW/h) would use ~700 MW of this type, or ~350k gallons of water an hour, which would be 0.2% of the Colorado rivers flow rate last year.
Pulling recent data from the EIA, of the roughly 10,000 megawatts of new power capacity installed in Arizona between 2023 and 2025, 50% is batteries, 40% solar, 6.5% wind, and 3.5% gas. Now, most solar and wind plants rarely if ever hit their nameplate capacity, but it’s pretty clear the large majority of new power generation isn’t consuming water.
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/eia860/
Does that change the math above if they're tied into the grid?
If they're tied directly to the renewables (Meta is doing this in some places), then true, not a technical increase. But you could still maybe claim they're instead preventing the equivalent reduction on average/grid (and, say, decommission of some of that coal). I suppose that's a separate point.
If it’s truly separated (no interconnect agreement) or generation capacity is below 1 MW, it won’t show up in EIA data, yes. Rooftop solar is also not included in the data for that reason.
It's the type of situation where that amount of water use isn't going to move the needle very much even in the desert, but building thermal power plants there there is still kind of silly because a) deserts are generally well-suited to solar, and b) you could also build thermal power plants in places like the midwest where that amount of water use is totally irrelevant.
Ok, those are truly closed loop. As in, they use ambient cooling or active chillers. I've seen too many cooling tower sites described as closed-loop because the internal system is.
Alaska’s land is pretty rugged and hard to build on. It would be interesting to hear from someone who works in the industry why the Northern Interior states like Montana, North Dakota, and Minnesota have fewer data center buildouts than Texas though.
Sure, but it seems very reasonable to expect some co-hosting of latency sensitive tasks, especially with some low hanging thin client fruit, like cloud gaming and the like. I've been very happy not burning a thousand watts of $0.45/kWh power locally, for my AC to force out of the house, to run blender.
Does this mean that no U.S. privacy oriented data will be stored in Finland.
No traceable HIPAA data or financial data and no national security data.
... or is it stored in Finland but encoded.
Before the American tinfoil-hat data center nuts comes out in force:
- This is a plant that was going to be decommissioned without investment
- Finland is a rational country due to their small size and unfortunate proximity to Russia. They tend to do rational things like invest in good energy infrastructure. Nobody will be losing power due to this deal
- Finland is one of the cleanest/greenest energy markets on earth, and the country is largely a giant unpopulated forest
- Finland currently has the highest unemployment in Europe, this is a great win for them, and they correctly view this as such since they are not stupid
- While the media may try to make it happen, very few Finnish people will be wearing tinfoil hats while screaming about conspiracies that data centers destroy H20 molecules, since they have one of the best education systems in the world
Its pretty delusional to suggest that working nuclear plant was going to be decommissioned without this considering that electricity consumption is projected to rise rapidly. There currently is shortage of steady power in Finland so no nuclear plants are gonna be closed barring catastrophes.
Absent AI, this plant is absolutely the type of thing that a left/Green Party would vote to shut down under the premise that the cost is too great to retool/maintain it and “nuclear bad.” This is a Cold War era Russian plant that needs retooling.
Yes and Nordea has predicted housing prices will start to climb again every quarter for the last 3 years. Next quarter I guess!
Electricity demand will likely stay well under the lower end of those estimates, but its good that estimating is done optimistically, given it means that level of demand is planned to be supported already.
So it's not like electricity demand is going to grow modestly within a declining energy demand environment (which opens up other opportunities) while nothing new is being built.
The American data-center hysteria is mostly due to the fact that Americans have made it impossible (and have lost a lot of the expertise needed) to build infrastructure, and their faster growing power demand is NOT being met with new supply. This was already happening decades ago, before factoring in AI. US infrastructure is massively underfunded and 60-80 years outdated in most areas due to poor government policy.
Did Germany plan to increase electricity consumption? Gas heating is still king there, and Germany famously promotes hydrogen (mostly from gas) over battery vehicles.
Not really. Situation now is totally different to what it was when Germany made those decisions. In Finland shutting down nuclear hasn't really been something that has been discussed seriously in very long time.
> while screaming about conspiracies that data centers destroy H20 molecules
This is a gross misrepresentation of the concern. Clean fresh water is locally very important and a finite resource. The vast majority of people know it does not destroy H2O molecules, but moves them to a less useful space.
If the consumers of AI aren't paying the marginal costs for the energy they're using, it's a market distortion and we won't have working market discovery of the actual cost performance of the AI. "Wow tokens are so cheap let's use AI for everything" meanwhile the costs are actually being hidden elsewhere.
For over a decade, Google's been wearing the environmentally-friendly / carbon-neutral label as part of their public-facing brand values. It's definitely been eating into their CapEx then, and this isn't much different.
3a. AI companies make hyperbolic projections on the future use of AI and plan building and powering data centers according to that.
5. when the AI bubble bursts, we'll be left with huge amounts of unused/half-built data center capacity and unused power (with complications such as the data centers belonging to creditors and not being worth nearly as much as the inflated prices paid for building them).
Everyone is rushing to send signals of AI growth to the market. Their continued valuation growth depends on it. There is no real use story that cannot be met by smaller distilled models which are far more energy efficient. I am convinced the next step will be scaremongering impending extinction level event followed by need to classify AI activities as national security related. Once you become part of the military industrial complex, it's all gravy baby!
The plant may be closed without this Google's order. The cost to keep it running is substantial. I guess that's what you prefer?
"The Finland deal will ensure that the Loviisa plant keeps operating beyond 2030, the companies said in a statement. Keeping it running until 2050 will require about €1 billion of investments over the years"
Lol, it certainly wouldn't have been decommissioned in any case. For that to happen electricity consumption would need to be going down instead of up and Finland would need to have abundance of steady power to replace it.
No public money needed, it is easily profitable to do without.
And to answer your question: yes I and everyone else in Finland were willkng to wait and find out, it was and is not feasible option to shut it down in few years. If it actually was a realistic option this would have been big news for years now with the highly variable electricity prices we've had after the Russia attack on Ukraine.
Why does it matter that homes "aren't clean" while Google is? That's silly. There's going to be the same level of demand no matter what - the same mix of coal and nuclear inputs will happen regardless of where the outflows are. It's fungible.
More demand will in time result in an increase in supply. That's a good thing. We'll be building a lot more, and it's long overdue.
Google is buying the output because they are increasing demand by half a nuclear power plant's worth of power. I actually think it's pretty reasonable to pass a law demanding they build an entire nuclear power plant here.
"The agreement with Fortum provides long-term financial certainty for the Loviisa plant, which currently generates about 10% of Finland's electricity.
Fortum said Google's commitment would support an investment programme aimed at extending the life of the nuclear station and increasing its generating capacity."
Long-term PPAs are what you usually want because they are bankable and give you solid demand on which to expand. Which is literally what they're talking about doing.
If I build a house and the demand goes up I don't have to build the solar panels (and everything else involved) to cover it, I pay the utility company to build that based on how much I'm needing to use. Well, normally I pay for whatever they think will make them the most money to deliver that much electricity - Google is specifically paying to make sure the utility company sees it as increased demand and revenue for more nuclear.
Governments are extremely bad at calculating how much something "should" cost. Profits are revenue minus expenses. "Expenses" are revenue to someone else. Whenever you try to cap "profit" of some entity that isn't actually subject to competitive pressure, the next thing that happens is that the people running it start colluding or taking kickbacks from any of the people whose revenue constitutes their expenses.
Because then the utility company's expenses go up, which they would normally not want because it reduces their profit, except that then they can say that their profit isn't over the threshold and use that to increase revenue (i.e. raise prices) and still make the same profit but now also get the kickbacks under the table or help out their cronies by overpaying them.
It also in general deprives them of the incentive to improve efficiency, because reducing waste lowers expenses, which in a normal system you have the incentive to do because it means you make more money, but not if profit is a fixed amount defined by the law regardless of what you do.
Which is to say, it's much better to find a way to narrow the utility monopoly as much as possible and subject them to competitive pressure as much as possible, than to try to pretend that you can limit the profit of an entire monopoly supply chain by declaring that a single entity in it can only have a specific amount.
Do those problems exist as much if the excess was forced into them investing into a certain type of power generation? It seems less "heavy handed", since it's a proper investment for them.
I enjoy a particularly nasty utility monopoly where I am, in a dark blue state, where there is exactly zero political interest in breaking any monopolies. Any competition would probably have to be forced at a federal level. I think less bribing of politicians would happen if you tried to make them do something they were basically already going to do.
> Do those problems exist as much if the excess was forced into them investing into a certain type of power generation?
The premise of "excess" already has the problem baked into it.
Suppose an efficient company could provide service for $100 with a $10 profit, but regulators have no practical way of establishing this. The incumbent is instead providing service for $200 with a $10 profit, but then receiving $30 in kickbacks under the table or something of equivalent value not being accounted for in the official books from whoever is now getting $190 instead of $90.
Whereas getting them to invest in a particular type of generation was never hard because you can just give them a financial incentive to do it. If they have to pay a carbon tax out of their profits, which generation types are they going to add?
At this point with all the free-market-hand waving going around, it feels like someone telling me that it's not urin raining down on me, just sparkling trickle down economics.
King Richard II would have killed for an iPhone, PS5, air conditioning, and Uber Eats. He'd swap places with you, and he was king. You don't realize how awesome you have it.
Just a hundred years ago your ancestors were (probably) eating rotten meat and drinking unclean water.
You’re assuming a large enough supply that can absorb demand. This is true in China but not generally in the West.
If supply was just in time constructed so you maybe have only like 10-30% extra vs peak, the 50% of a nuclear power plant shifts the preexisting non-Google demand onto the non-nuclear sources as the plant can no longer meet its non-Google demand. It’s generally no different than if Google acquired that electricity from the available mix rather than the plant directly.
The thing it gives them is the ability to meet their individual net-0 targets (and thus government incentives) - a local optimization at the cost of a global net negative (at least as far as carbon electricity sources goes)
This is a case where the supply was about to be gone and Google provided funds to keep it operating (the original nuclear reactor began operation in 1977 and it now needed EUR 700M to extend the service life). And one can probably guess that this supply just wasn’t cost competitive in the first place, but Google increased the demand so much that it now becomes cost competitive.
Source? The provider had requested to extend the lifetime of that particular reactor to 2050 2 years ago (something they’d started considering 8 years ago). Now maybe they did this contingent on expecting this Google deal to materialize, but it’s not clear to me these Google funds are strictly the only reason they’d keep operating the plant.
Somehow folks want this little problem of climate change to go away without any change in their own behaviors. Somehow corporations who sell them goods will just magically "be green" while flying around the world and drinking out of plastic bottles and subscribing to the latest fast-fashion website. But then when the corporations say "yes we should be green" that's a problem too. You just can't please some people, they're just here to complain, not actually see anything positive in the world.
Do you know how South Australia solved a problem of the Whyalla Steelworks when transitioning to 100% renewable electricity? They excluded on-site generation of the plant from the statistics. "Solarization" of the plant hadn't worked out economically. Continuous manufacturing processes have big problems with intermittent energy sources.
China is building tens of nuclear power plants though.
> Continuous manufacturing processes have big problems with intermittent energy sources.
Intermittent energy sources are predictable in aggregate. A fairly modest amount of storage to smooth things out and you can pretty reasonably get above 50% solar and wind. Make up a large chunk of the balance with nuclear and hydro and you're pretty close to 100%.
The last 10% is obviously the hardest, but what's the excuse for countries still doing majority fossil fuels?
> China is building tens of nuclear power plants though.
Trouble being they're still operating ~1200 coal power plants.
Predictability will not get a plant through the night by itself. BTW, it's about 7 units of wind energy to 1 unit of solar energy plus significant overcapacity plus increase of the grid transmission capacity plus additional measures for grid stabilization (like synchronous condensers) to get to a "fairly modest amount of storage."
> Trouble being they're still operating ~1200 coal power plants.
> BTW, it's about 7 units of wind energy to 1 unit of solar energy plus significant overcapacity plus increase of the grid transmission capacity plus additional measures for grid stabilization (like synchronous condensers) to get to a "fairly modest amount of storage."
No it doesn't. You install 12 hours worth of batteries at the factory and "there is no solar at night" is solved, and doing that is already cost competitive with coal on the majority of days.
The problem comes when generation is low not because it's night but because it's cloudy for an extended period of time. But that only happens a small minority of the time, and doesn't require you to burn fossil fuels the other 90% of the time.
You also don't need things like synchronous condensers when you're using a non-trivial amount of nuclear or hydro, neither of which is coal.
> Yeah, it's because of the above points.
Then how do so many other industrialized countries do it without that amount of coal?
Canada and Spain are each only ~22% fossil fuels. France is <5%. The UK is 31% and only 0.1% of that is coal.
> You install 12 hours worth of batteries at the factory
I literally laughed out loud, sorry. Providing baseload with BESS alone? That's rich. Literally. Extremely expensive. In addition to impractical amount of batteries it requires impractical overcapacity to compensate for seasonal variation.
> Then why is no other country burning that amount of coal?
China does about 30% of the world's industrial production and 40% of metal production, while having around 50% of world's coal power plants. They are working on it though. Many of their new coal plants are peaker plants.
Battery storage has a levelized cost of ~$0.20/kWh. Solar is ~$0.04/kWh. If you're using the batteries for 50% of kWh you end up at an average of ~$0.14/kWh, which is in the same range as coal.
> it requires impractical overcapacity to compensate for seasonal variation.
Only if you're trying to do 100% of generation from one source. Solar generates more power in the summer, wind generates more power in the winter. Meanwhile you don't have to use overcapacity at all when your target isn't fully 100%. You have enough solar to not need fossil fuels in the warmer months at all, enough wind to only need them 20% of the time in cooler months, and then only 10% of your kWh come from fossil fuels.
> China does about 30% of the world's industrial production and 40% of metal production, while having around 50% of world's coal power plants.
Those are unwelcome numbers even proportional to the amount of manufacturing.
> Many of their new coal plants are peaker plants.
"New coal plants" is rather the problem in itself. The number we need to be going down is instead going up.
1 tonne of steel requires around 5MWh of energy at 50,000 tonnes per day it's around 250GWh of batteries at 50% usage. The largest planned BESS is 19GWh. As I said solar+BESS is impractical.
Wind is more expensive. Onshore wind turbines have higher variability. Offshore ones are limited to coastal areas. Overall, there's a lot of practical problems. It's all doable, but building infrastructure takes time.
China's onshore wind potential is 12.6 PWh/year[1]. China's 2024 energy consumption is 9.85 PWh[2]. It's not much of overcapacity potential. Huh. I though it's higher.
Per capita is worse by definition, unless your arguing that people with higher per capita emissions are somehow more valuable to society than those with lower.
The other aspect is that China provides a large industrial base for the West, which is arguably the West just externalizing/offshoring their emissions anyway.
> Per capita is worse by definition, unless your arguing that people with higher per capita emissions are somehow more valuable to society than those with lower.
By what definition? If Norway has a 100x higher per-capital admissions rate and 5 people live there it’s inconsequential.
> The other aspect is that China provides a large industrial base for the West, which is arguably the West just externalizing/offshoring their emissions anyway.
I think that is a bad argument because China prefers to have that capacity and specifically courted it as part of their national strategy. Emissions they create are theirs to blame too. Ask China - would you rather have these factories or have lower emissions? The answer is 100% have the factories (and jobs).
When you write things like China is arguably the recipient of western emissions offshoring, despite western countries taking actions to decarbonize or add environmental efficiencies, you deprive China and Chinese people of agency and responsible for their decisions.
> When you write things like China is arguably the recipient of western emissions offshoring, despite western countries taking actions to decarbonize or add environmental efficiencies, you deprive China and Chinese people of agency and responsible for their decisions.
Not only that, it's a misdirect to try to blame countries that have more stringent emissions rules for the results in a country that doesn't.
Suppose that every country banned coal. Obviously then the location of the factories or customers wouldn't affect the amount of coal being burned because the number would be zero either way.
Suppose no country regulated emissions at all. Again the amount of coal being burned doesn't depend on the location of the factories because companies would be able to burn as much as they like regardless of where they are.
But suppose that some countries have emissions rules and others don't. As a result, the companies that want to burn coal move to the countries where they're allowed to do it. Now the amount of emissions does depend on where the factories are. But if the country where they are had the same emissions rules then they would be less competitive -- and so they choose to attract a disproportionate share of the manufacturing to a place that uses dirty power. That's definitely a choice -- compare it to the outcome where every country stops burning coal.
It’s unclear. It helps Google with their marketing that they’re a net zero carbon company. But if what’s happening is they’re displacing previous nuclear power users onto dirtier, that’s not really reducing carbon and it’s making it seem like Google isn’t the problem when it actually is - without them that community might otherwise be 100% nuclear and it would be no different from a macro level from Google adding that consumption to dirty sources.
Where did you read this? What I read is that Fortum was considering extending to 2050 as early as 2018 and finalized those plans 2 years ago. I read nothing that indicates the survival of this plant is dependent on this Google deal.
> But if what’s happening is they’re displacing previous nuclear power users onto dirtier, that’s not really reducing carbon
That's not the case, because in EU (and thus Finland) electric production is under cap-and-trade. There is just no way to increase dirty electricity production in EU. Apart from political pressure to change rules, which for example Italy is doing because Italy built their grid on gas...
If I consume all the clean energy your country can produce with my data center, explain how cap and trade blocks a country from using other sources - I don’t think anyone will like news stories of people freezing to death in the winter.
That's the CAP part. The annual co2 emissions of electricity production and industries is capped to X gigatons per year. If a datacenter buys all clean electric production of the country, electric companies will have to either have to make up the gap by building more new clean energy or tell other customers "sorry all sold out".
Of course, would the latter happen, political actions would be done before people freeze. It will be unpredictable what the would be - allow fossil fuels "temporarily" or order datacenters to shut down during dunkelflaute? Interesting times (I would prefer less interesting times).
Generally speaking cap and trade is the most sure way to reduce emissions (emissions drop exactly at the pace the CAP drop annually) and the most cost-effective way also - the TRADE part ensures emissions are cut first by those who it easiest, while hard-to-decarbonize sectors have most time to sort their plan.
The only problem is "carbon leakage" where co2 emissions simply move to asshole countries like USA and China that do not utilize cap-and-trade. That should be dealt with hefty carbon tariffs. Oh wait, even china is building their own cap-and-trade system. Well, anyways, tariffs against the climate assholes.
The EU has a large problem with carbon leakage from electricity generation to oil and gas use.
For example, gas heating is exempt from the EU carbon trade, so people are encouraged to use that rather than electric heating. In countries like Germany, gas heating is popular largely for tax reasons.
Gas heating is a pre-existing issue in Germany. While there is handful on anecdotes of someone switching back to gas, the big trend is opposite. Majority of heating refurbishments are gas/oil -> heat pumps, and almost every new build is heat pumps.
carbon leakage is mostly industrial and data centers (why do so many europeans run code at us-east-1 ?)
It's a good thing that green energy isn't a fixed quantity and more can be built if there's demand, which is exactly what Google is doing.
It's great for marketing and, you're right, that's why they are doing it but the reason it's good for marketing is that their customers care about the environment. This is the exact invisible hand mechanism in action. It's their preferences changing the behavior of one of the biggest corporations in the world and all they can do is act like it doesn't count because they don't actually care
Nuclear power plants have a huge lead time and require government approval, something the Finnish government declined to approve (Fortum had requested to build a third reactor). Solar and wind are fine but they’re not usable as a replacement for nuclear without huge battery installations which make the cost worse than nuclear. Also large installations still take time - from regulatory approvals to actually building the thing to connecting it to the grid. To give you a sense of scale, of the 53GW of planned wind projects, only 0.9GW are under active construction.
Also, unlike solar and wind, nuclear is a very important anchor source to prevent fossil fuel use in the grid. Solar and wind only absorb growth but so far have never managed to actually compete on baseload power requirements.
Note that when Fortum was declined it was because two others were given approval. Lack of new nuclear in Finland isn't because no permits, but because Olkiluoto 3 exposed the real costs so Olkiluoto 4 was cancelled. Russia was the partner in the other one so that went to hell with the attack to Ukraine.
Shouldn't we stop pushing the cost of things onto the public, in both CO2 and nuclear contamination?
Surely a nuclear reactor is only economical if you don't have to pay for the cost of a Chernobyl type event. Did they assess the costs? Surely they played the costs down as the public is going to pay for the consequences. Shrug. It's so easy to do business this way. The fins also expose themselves to blackmail by an adversarial neighbor.
But if this is all well reasoned we can now start building data centers on the south pole and dump the nuclear waste where no one notices it. Because that's the fumbling policy relied on. The people are being played for fools.
1. Chernobyl disaster was not related in any way with nuclear plant normal functioning. It was "experiment of how low output reactor can go" proposed and exercised by people without knowledge or experience. It's monument of why government officials should not touch anything related to science
2. Chernobyl nuclear plant was very poor copy of safe by design nuclear plant. It had critical flaw in carbon based proton catching mechanism
3. Closed zone is currently habitable (except Sarcophagus area). You'll receive much higher radiation dose simply by flying to Norway. Nature is returning there, there're plans to repopulate it
4. This was in Soviet Union and power plant was "public". Most of the power plant in EU is public if not every single one. I don't have exact information on this topic
Please do not treat entire technology, which is safe, as a threat simply because some greedy, uneducated people from the past wanted better position and paid ultimate price for it
The Chernobyl disaster wasn't caused by a single person, as you note in your comment "proposed and exercised by people without knowledge or experience."
Chernobyl disaster was biggest nuclear accident, but not the biggest disaster related to energy production. In 1975 the failure of the Banqiao Reservoir Dam and other dams in Henan Province, China caused more casualties than any other dam failure in history. The disaster killed an estimated 171,000 people and 11 million people lost their homes. It's not much known in the West because various elements of the Chinese government concealed the details of the disaster until the 1990s.
In terms of loss of life Chernobyl disaster is comparable to Bhopal disaster (at least 3,787 over 16,000 claimed deaths), caused by Methyl isocyanate leak from the storage tank. A combination of poorly-maintained or non-functional facilities, a disregard of safety standards, and an under-trained workforce made it possible for water to leak into the MIC tanks in the absence of properly working safety systems.
Chernobyl disaster was caused by a combination of reactor design error and operator error. After this errors have been fixed (different nuclear fuel composition, modern monitoring and controlling equipment, improved operator training and procedures) there are still 7 operational RBMK in Russia. (The same reactor type as Chernobyl)
https://www.hetzner.com/pressroom/five-years-helsinki/
These low prices are cost savings that we pass directly onto our customers; they come from the reduced energy prices that we pay in Finland compared to Germany, and also come from the colder climate and lower cooling requirements
This isn't investing in power infrastructure in any way, there is no reality where that nuclear plant wasn't staying in operation as long as they can possibly keep it running in the foreseeable future. Basically only way Google and Fortum will be building new nuclear capacity is by Finland promising to cover any electricity price below 15 cents per kWh in the market.
If you reduce supply,price generally goes up. Buying a power plants output reduces supply
Of course everyone’s else’s co2 emissions then increase instead.
The only solution is more zero co2 emissions. Google could have funded large wind farms, or a new nuclear plant, or grid connections to other locations. But that would cost more.
You buying a doughnut - even half the doughnuts - from a doughnut shop does not increase the price of the remaining doughnuts unless they can't make enough to satisfy remaining demand and people are willing to outbid you rather than wait.
Does that power station have enough capacity to satisfy the remaining demand?
Finland has low emissions from electricity :
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/all/yearly
71 gC02eq/kwH
France, Sweden and Norway look like good places for data centres in Europe too on the basis of low electricity emissions.
A lot of the green energy is from hydro dams and you can't really add new rivers to the geography to support additional industry.
It will be interesting to see how the Rolls-Royce SMR project works out. Since it appears to be impossible to build anything cheaply in the UK, this will be the real test.
The solution is to build nuclear power stations on ships in China, then sail them to the UK and plug them in.
If power prices elsewhere in the world become advantageous, sail them elsewhere and plug them in there.
You still have the interconnection costs, but seaside places sometimes have high voltage connections for existing or historic power plants (who themselves are water cooled)
The US has effective run this on itself for the past few years. The Chinese look fairly benign in comparison.
Those wind farms would have connected into the zones with the highest prices.
They've rejected an amount that would generate more than the entire grid usage. Or way more than double what the cheap zones generate from their 2/3rds hydro and 1/3rd wind.
yes, you can - with all those fiords surrounded by mountains you can use excess wind/solar (your own as well as German, etc.) and pump water up a dammed fiord to generate the electricity later when no cheap excess available.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian_Mountains
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gullmarn
The solution works only to keep a steady production of electricity, but if the demand would require full output all the time then these "mechanical batteries" don't help.
The countries that could decarbonize their electricity all rely on nuclear, hydro or geotherm.
1) We're not expanding hydropower generation very much. We can upgrade existing dams for improved efficiency, but no new dams are being planned, because it's politically and environmentally arduous to do so. There's some wind buildout, but that's also a political quagmire due to nimbyism. Nuclear isn't even close to having a political consensus behind it, and even if it did, it would take years. And our geography is uniquely ill suited for solar.
2) Winters have less and less snow, summers have less and less rain, leading to issues filling reservoirs. This will only get worse in the future.
3) The north has a surplus, but the infrastructure for transferring it to the south is underdeveloped
4) lots of the electricity we generate is being sold to central Europe to compensate for Germany's idiotic decision to shut down their nuclear reactors and Trump's idiotic decision to send oil prices over $100
Unfortunately data centres are currently being built, which depresses me. Because who will use them? Giant American tech companies will use them, to lobotomise our youth, poison our political discourse and steal our personal data. Fuck that.
Data centres also create very few jobs beyond the initial construction phase. Overall it's a very, very bad deal for Norway as a nation.
Weird
On top of that, heating still runs mostly on gas, which won't be fun this winter. Due to the inefficiency of gas heating, there will be less gas available for Germany's gas power plants.
Now imagine if Germany's dream of hydrogen vehicles, where most hydrogen comes from gas, also became a reality...
> Finland has emerged as an attractive location for data centres because of its cool climate, plentiful low-carbon electricity and relatively uncongested power grid.
https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/around-the-gl...
Edit: I was wrong, the locations do have small (5-10 MW) district heating networks.
One can imagine the saunas the guys will have there :)
On the main point - there are persistent leaks/rumors that one of the main points of the Trump's envoys (Kushner and Witkoff) to Putin is building data centers in Karelia ( the Russian side of Finland border) - the same reasons of cheap electricity and plentiful of cool water.
They didn't want to just buy clean hydro that already existed, or renewables that were going to get built anyway without their money, they wanted to be sure that their investment was growing the amount of clean energy available.
I'm hoping they have some justification like this for buying existing nuclear. They appear to be claiming that it would shut if they didn't pay in advance.
A similar deal by Amazon got shot down in America because the regulators realised it was shifting costs onto other grid users.
You'd assume that Finnish regulators are better than American regulators, but I’d like to see some evidence of that.
The technology, compression, etc, for models are getting better and better requiring less and less H/W and power to run the same inference power.
Perhaps our hunger for ever more powerful models will be enough to offset this, but I am not sure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Will incredibly efficient new GPUs appear? will custom ASIC, models burned in silicons, take off? Will unified memory systems become usable?
The datacenter bets are that things will mostly continue like now, and that these GPUs won’t depreciate too much.
For now theses bets are self-fulfilling, causing hardware to even appreciate.
I expect as LLMs penetrate further, we'll see much more of it, continually running, and doing more 3D work.
- paid 0e company tax in 2023/2024 (2025 hasn't been published yet)
- Doesn't generate any value added taxes as it only has one customer, Google Emea in Ireland
- Employs directly 120 persons
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loviisa_Nuclear_Power_Plant
Nuclear power plants are notorious for their long planning, approval and build times (and cost overruns). Then again, I wouldn't want to live near a nuclear power plant built as fast as a data center either...
A lot of reactors in the US are similarly dependent on Russia for uranium enrichment and supplies. Some of that dependency relates to post cold war era treaties (now cancelled because of the strained relationship with Russia) for Russia to decommission its nuclear weaponry and to help Russia economically.
The Loviisa plant actually predates the end of the cold war but Finland at the time was not part of NATO and the relationship with the Soviet Union was very complicated given that they had fought an ugly war in WW II that ended up with the Soviet Union taking a large chunk of Finnish territory. The Loviisa plant ended up built during what is now seen as the definitely very chilly phase of the cold war (under Brezhnev).
And then Finland repeated the mistake with their more recent nuclear additions.
Not sure if this particular project is also sponsored by taxpayers' money or not, though.
Power prices will go up, since any growth will exceed the available power generation capacity. Power will become dirtier, since diesel generators will fill in when there is high demand. Then the community will spend a huge amount of money building out more capacity.
I think we will all soon see, communities sharing power infrastructure with massive-demand corporate customers will end badly for the communities.
I have no real evidence for this but I think a general principle of good governance is that the policy is agnostic to the industries which it affects and robust under any set of conditions, so for instance, the price that electric utilities charge should be enough to pay for expansions, either prospectively or retroactively (via loans secured before the construction, taken out against projected future revenue), rather than subsidizing the expansion with taxes collected by industries that won't be using the electricity, or exercising discretionary control over which types of industrial expansion are accommodated through investments in expanding the energy infrastructure.
Huge expansions of energy production have occurred in the past to meet growing demand for energy from then-emerging industries. And I'm not aware of any past campaigns to stop the various industries that needed energy on account of the allegation that their increase in energy usage would burden other sectors of society. I have concern that the treatment of AI compute facilities is based on public opinion rather than rule of law and consistent protection of private property rights.
If you're in Finland and there are two possible uses for electricity production, let's say, either a steel plant or a datacentre. The steel plant will employ a bunch of people locally. A datacentre will employ a bunch of people in California.
So if you are to build a datacentre, the deal must necessarily be that the R&D for the models that are to run on it must happen locally. Otherwise there's no reason to give them the allocation over the steel plant.
But when ad-hoc deals are made anyway, then it is more important that principles like those have been applied than that everything is ideal.
More generally, the bias is to block development until safety/fairness issues are addressed, but it shouldn't be in my opinion, because that overlooks the risk of inaction.
When development is blocked, what that does is reduce visible risks. What it usually increases however is total risk. We are already under constant threat from deterioration: aging, depreciation and decay. Entropy is the default. Action is what pushes back against it.
We need to weigh any risks restriction prevents against the risks it leaves us less equipped to mitigate.
The trouble with this is that people frequently don't like the consequences of that.
For example, a lot of the costs of a grid connection are non-linear if not totally independent of the amount of power you use. When a tree falls on a power line and a crew has to show up and install a new pole, the cost of that has nothing to do with the average percent utilization of those wires. Likewise, a line that can deliver 100MW to a single customer costs more than one that can handle 100kW, but it doesn't cost anywhere near 1000 times as much or consume 1000 times more land etc.
The result of this is that the "works under any set of conditions" pricing for a grid connection would be a flat monthly fee for the capacity of the line totally independent of how much you use, and a line with 1000 times the capacity would only cost e.g. 10 times as much. But then a typical household electric bill would have a fixed charge of ~$100/mo for a grid connection regardless of how little electricity you use.
Likewise, if you have a high proportion of renewable generation in the grid then the price per kWh during daylight hours when there are clear skies would be essentially zero, but the price on a cold still night in winter would be oppressively high and anyone who failed to turn off their electric heat on that specific day would end up with a $5000 electric bill.
So in most places what happens instead is that the power company charges a fee per kWh which is used to pay line crews and other expenses that don't actually depend on usage and then have a much lower fixed connection charge. And charge a certain amount per kWh during days when supply is sufficient and then use the money to subsidize consumption during shortfalls, even though that actually raises total costs, because otherwise people would scream about prices hitting $500/kWh for a few hours every year or two.
But once you're doing those things, a customer that wants megawatts of power is reasonably going to object to that rate structure, because the few percent inefficiency those things induce is millions of dollars in their case. At which point people start complaining about subsidies, even though not doing those things would be the absence of subsidies.
I am not a regulator but that feels like something that needs new rules
My own cursory take on AI compute facilities is that they're mostly much better for the community than previous industries. They emit zero industrial pollution, and only require water for cooling and energy from any source. The water used can also be recycled. And even in the early designs that don't use recycled water, the water consumed is orders of magnitude less than agriculture.
On the downside, they produce fewer jobs, but they encourage and fund infrastructure upgrades in telecom links and power transmission, which has second-order benefits for the local economy.
And they consume very little government services, so the taxes they pay produce a much larger fiscal surplus for local governments.
They also allow for energy that would otherwise be uneconomical to harvest, to be economically harvested. Let's just take an example of a desert which has very little wildlife, and no major nearby populations. AI compute facilities can make it economical to harvest the sunlight in those regions and make economic use of it.
Side note: Really nice dashboard.
They are not used to the aggressiveness of FAANG negotiators, they treat them as friends.
Not Texas and Arizona. Why?
The reason Texas is experiencing a boom in data centers is friendlier power grid policies to data centers (similar to why Google is building in Finland), in combination with (relatively small) tax incentives.
Overall, it's not exactly a ton of jobs for how much money is going into them, but it isn't nothing.
I’m not disputing that data center buildouts will have some localized job creation, but the net effect of all those data centers will be overwhelmingly negative on employment if everything the AI companies are saying is true
It will be pretty, but rather quiet.
That's your original point, which is wrong since, as you admitted, data center boom is clearly creating jobs.
If you meant those jobs are offset by the negative effect of AI in general if we believe AI companies, a study by Anthropic was actively discussed here a few days ago. TLDR: they don't believe there will be mass unemployment because of AI
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49626373
I’m sure Anthropic is saying that now, but there’s no escaping the fact that they and OpenAI repeatedly harped on how it would eliminate mass amounts of jobs for years. Or the mass layoffs blamed on AI that we have already seen.
Renewables can compete but take longer to build. Nuclear is more expensive and takes forever to build. Maybe SMRs will happen but I’m not holding my breath. It’s harder than it sounds to scale that.
Depending on how far north you mean, you lose all or all but one of the above.
When Finland contracted with France to build their latest reactor, they wisely had a fixed price contract where the French company would pay for const overruns. At groundbreaking in 2005, they planned for a 2009 completion. In 2016 it bankrupted Areva, with the French government owned EDG saving parts of the company crucial to the nation. It wasn't completed u tip 2023:
https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/2...
When the US last decided to build nuclear, Westinghouse AP1000s, two in South Carolina and two in Georgia, it resulted in the bankruptcy on Westinghouse, putting all of Toshiba, its owner, at risk:
https://www.csis.org/analysis/westinghouses-bankruptcy-and-i...
The two South Carolina reactors were abandoned at the cost of a substantial fraction of the build cost, in the billions, and utility executives went to jail for deception about it. Georgia finished its two reactors, but only by creating some of the most expensive electricity out there today.
Storage and renewables are cheaper, faster to deploy, and work really really really well in Texas and Arizona. Despite nearly free natural gas in Texas due its state as a by-product of oil extraction, most of the new electricity grid assets in Texas are wind, storage, and solar, and that's independent third party investors making those choice in the grid to make money, as Texas has perhaps the "freest" electricity market in the United States when it comes to who is allowed to build grid assets and make money off them.
If the far north places have hydro that's already built and not being used, that makes sense for data centers. But new nuclear is not a serious technology, it exists mostly based on vibes.
It seems to me the main problem is we build so little of it that we don't have the people, skills, supply chains etc to do it well. China generally builds it's reactors on schedule and within budget.
And even with all that their total share of nuclear is declining y/&y and projected to continue to decline. Because it’s still too expensive even for a autocracy
Unfortunately, the project was cancelled for moronic political reasons.
That probably matters a lot less for AI.
* easy permitting
* lots of space
Something like 500g/MWh for gas/coal/nuclear (~70% of power in AZ), so a huge xAI datacenter (Colossus 2, ~1 GW/h) would use ~700 MW of this type, or ~350k gallons of water an hour, which would be 0.2% of the Colorado rivers flow rate last year.
I don't know if that's significant.
If they're tied directly to the renewables (Meta is doing this in some places), then true, not a technical increase. But you could still maybe claim they're instead preventing the equivalent reduction on average/grid (and, say, decommission of some of that coal). I suppose that's a separate point.
https://q.com/resources/how-qts-data-centers-use-closed-loop...
Pennsylvania, for example, was one of the few places to take Walmart to task for employing illegal labor.
Texas and Arizona are notoriously anti-union and anti-resident/pro-corporation.
What do you mean Texas is anti-resident?
- This is a plant that was going to be decommissioned without investment
- Finland is a rational country due to their small size and unfortunate proximity to Russia. They tend to do rational things like invest in good energy infrastructure. Nobody will be losing power due to this deal
- Finland is one of the cleanest/greenest energy markets on earth, and the country is largely a giant unpopulated forest
- Finland currently has the highest unemployment in Europe, this is a great win for them, and they correctly view this as such since they are not stupid
- While the media may try to make it happen, very few Finnish people will be wearing tinfoil hats while screaming about conspiracies that data centers destroy H20 molecules, since they have one of the best education systems in the world
Finlands energy use in general is in decline, their economy isn’t growing and neither is their population: https://www.treasuryfinland.fi/annualreview2022/energy-consu...
Absent AI, this plant is absolutely the type of thing that a left/Green Party would vote to shut down under the premise that the cost is too great to retool/maintain it and “nuclear bad.” This is a Cold War era Russian plant that needs retooling.
That is the estimate by the transmission system operator Fingrid. Note that energy consumption and electricity consumption are two different things.
https://www.fingrid.fi/en/grid/development/prospects-for-fut...
In Finland there aren't any political parties talking about shutting down nuclear power.
Electricity demand will likely stay well under the lower end of those estimates, but its good that estimating is done optimistically, given it means that level of demand is planned to be supported already.
So it's not like electricity demand is going to grow modestly within a declining energy demand environment (which opens up other opportunities) while nothing new is being built.
The American data-center hysteria is mostly due to the fact that Americans have made it impossible (and have lost a lot of the expertise needed) to build infrastructure, and their faster growing power demand is NOT being met with new supply. This was already happening decades ago, before factoring in AI. US infrastructure is massively underfunded and 60-80 years outdated in most areas due to poor government policy.
This is a gross misrepresentation of the concern. Clean fresh water is locally very important and a finite resource. The vast majority of people know it does not destroy H2O molecules, but moves them to a less useful space.
2. AI requires power^
3. AI companies purchase/produce power
4. Humans complain that AI uses power (but continue to use AI)
^Same for water
This is a silly 'news cycle' witch hunt that no economist takes even mildly seriously.
Not all humans
5. when the AI bubble bursts, we'll be left with huge amounts of unused/half-built data center capacity and unused power (with complications such as the data centers belonging to creditors and not being worth nearly as much as the inflated prices paid for building them).
"The Finland deal will ensure that the Loviisa plant keeps operating beyond 2030, the companies said in a statement. Keeping it running until 2050 will require about €1 billion of investments over the years"
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-09/google-gi...
Second of all, if it is not Google, it'd be either other businesses, or from tax money. Why should tax money be used to bail out a failed business?
And to answer your question: yes I and everyone else in Finland were willkng to wait and find out, it was and is not feasible option to shut it down in few years. If it actually was a realistic option this would have been big news for years now with the highly variable electricity prices we've had after the Russia attack on Ukraine.
Why does it matter that homes "aren't clean" while Google is? That's silly. There's going to be the same level of demand no matter what - the same mix of coal and nuclear inputs will happen regardless of where the outflows are. It's fungible.
More demand will in time result in an increase in supply. That's a good thing. We'll be building a lot more, and it's long overdue.
Fortum said Google's commitment would support an investment programme aimed at extending the life of the nuclear station and increasing its generating capacity."
Long-term PPAs are what you usually want because they are bankable and give you solid demand on which to expand. Which is literally what they're talking about doing.
I don't know about Finland specifically, but isn't this already the case practically everywhere?
Because then the utility company's expenses go up, which they would normally not want because it reduces their profit, except that then they can say that their profit isn't over the threshold and use that to increase revenue (i.e. raise prices) and still make the same profit but now also get the kickbacks under the table or help out their cronies by overpaying them.
It also in general deprives them of the incentive to improve efficiency, because reducing waste lowers expenses, which in a normal system you have the incentive to do because it means you make more money, but not if profit is a fixed amount defined by the law regardless of what you do.
Which is to say, it's much better to find a way to narrow the utility monopoly as much as possible and subject them to competitive pressure as much as possible, than to try to pretend that you can limit the profit of an entire monopoly supply chain by declaring that a single entity in it can only have a specific amount.
I enjoy a particularly nasty utility monopoly where I am, in a dark blue state, where there is exactly zero political interest in breaking any monopolies. Any competition would probably have to be forced at a federal level. I think less bribing of politicians would happen if you tried to make them do something they were basically already going to do.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/energyinnovation/2026/03/22/uti...
The premise of "excess" already has the problem baked into it.
Suppose an efficient company could provide service for $100 with a $10 profit, but regulators have no practical way of establishing this. The incumbent is instead providing service for $200 with a $10 profit, but then receiving $30 in kickbacks under the table or something of equivalent value not being accounted for in the official books from whoever is now getting $190 instead of $90.
Whereas getting them to invest in a particular type of generation was never hard because you can just give them a financial incentive to do it. If they have to pay a carbon tax out of their profits, which generation types are they going to add?
Is that not the miracle of the free market?
King Richard II would have killed for an iPhone, PS5, air conditioning, and Uber Eats. He'd swap places with you, and he was king. You don't realize how awesome you have it.
Just a hundred years ago your ancestors were (probably) eating rotten meat and drinking unclean water.
I don't for a moment believe that, but apparently arguments that cannot possibly be proven are in vogue nowadays.
If supply was just in time constructed so you maybe have only like 10-30% extra vs peak, the 50% of a nuclear power plant shifts the preexisting non-Google demand onto the non-nuclear sources as the plant can no longer meet its non-Google demand. It’s generally no different than if Google acquired that electricity from the available mix rather than the plant directly.
The thing it gives them is the ability to meet their individual net-0 targets (and thus government incentives) - a local optimization at the cost of a global net negative (at least as far as carbon electricity sources goes)
China is building tens of nuclear power plants though.
Intermittent energy sources are predictable in aggregate. A fairly modest amount of storage to smooth things out and you can pretty reasonably get above 50% solar and wind. Make up a large chunk of the balance with nuclear and hydro and you're pretty close to 100%.
The last 10% is obviously the hardest, but what's the excuse for countries still doing majority fossil fuels?
> China is building tens of nuclear power plants though.
Trouble being they're still operating ~1200 coal power plants.
> Trouble being they're still operating ~1200 coal power plants.
Yeah, it's because of the above points.
No it doesn't. You install 12 hours worth of batteries at the factory and "there is no solar at night" is solved, and doing that is already cost competitive with coal on the majority of days.
The problem comes when generation is low not because it's night but because it's cloudy for an extended period of time. But that only happens a small minority of the time, and doesn't require you to burn fossil fuels the other 90% of the time.
You also don't need things like synchronous condensers when you're using a non-trivial amount of nuclear or hydro, neither of which is coal.
> Yeah, it's because of the above points.
Then how do so many other industrialized countries do it without that amount of coal?
Canada and Spain are each only ~22% fossil fuels. France is <5%. The UK is 31% and only 0.1% of that is coal.
I literally laughed out loud, sorry. Providing baseload with BESS alone? That's rich. Literally. Extremely expensive. In addition to impractical amount of batteries it requires impractical overcapacity to compensate for seasonal variation.
> Then why is no other country burning that amount of coal?
China does about 30% of the world's industrial production and 40% of metal production, while having around 50% of world's coal power plants. They are working on it though. Many of their new coal plants are peaker plants.
Battery storage has a levelized cost of ~$0.20/kWh. Solar is ~$0.04/kWh. If you're using the batteries for 50% of kWh you end up at an average of ~$0.14/kWh, which is in the same range as coal.
> it requires impractical overcapacity to compensate for seasonal variation.
Only if you're trying to do 100% of generation from one source. Solar generates more power in the summer, wind generates more power in the winter. Meanwhile you don't have to use overcapacity at all when your target isn't fully 100%. You have enough solar to not need fossil fuels in the warmer months at all, enough wind to only need them 20% of the time in cooler months, and then only 10% of your kWh come from fossil fuels.
> China does about 30% of the world's industrial production and 40% of metal production, while having around 50% of world's coal power plants.
Those are unwelcome numbers even proportional to the amount of manufacturing.
> Many of their new coal plants are peaker plants.
"New coal plants" is rather the problem in itself. The number we need to be going down is instead going up.
Wind is more expensive. Onshore wind turbines have higher variability. Offshore ones are limited to coastal areas. Overall, there's a lot of practical problems. It's all doable, but building infrastructure takes time.
China's onshore wind potential is 12.6 PWh/year[1]. China's 2024 energy consumption is 9.85 PWh[2]. It's not much of overcapacity potential. Huh. I though it's higher.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13640... [2] https://english.www.gov.cn/archive/statistics/202501/20/cont...
The other aspect is that China provides a large industrial base for the West, which is arguably the West just externalizing/offshoring their emissions anyway.
By what definition? If Norway has a 100x higher per-capital admissions rate and 5 people live there it’s inconsequential.
> The other aspect is that China provides a large industrial base for the West, which is arguably the West just externalizing/offshoring their emissions anyway.
I think that is a bad argument because China prefers to have that capacity and specifically courted it as part of their national strategy. Emissions they create are theirs to blame too. Ask China - would you rather have these factories or have lower emissions? The answer is 100% have the factories (and jobs).
When you write things like China is arguably the recipient of western emissions offshoring, despite western countries taking actions to decarbonize or add environmental efficiencies, you deprive China and Chinese people of agency and responsible for their decisions.
Not only that, it's a misdirect to try to blame countries that have more stringent emissions rules for the results in a country that doesn't.
Suppose that every country banned coal. Obviously then the location of the factories or customers wouldn't affect the amount of coal being burned because the number would be zero either way.
Suppose no country regulated emissions at all. Again the amount of coal being burned doesn't depend on the location of the factories because companies would be able to burn as much as they like regardless of where they are.
But suppose that some countries have emissions rules and others don't. As a result, the companies that want to burn coal move to the countries where they're allowed to do it. Now the amount of emissions does depend on where the factories are. But if the country where they are had the same emissions rules then they would be less competitive -- and so they choose to attract a disproportionate share of the manufacturing to a place that uses dirty power. That's definitely a choice -- compare it to the outcome where every country stops burning coal.
They are not. The plant may not survive beyond 2030 without this order.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loviisa_Nuclear_Power_Plant
That's not the case, because in EU (and thus Finland) electric production is under cap-and-trade. There is just no way to increase dirty electricity production in EU. Apart from political pressure to change rules, which for example Italy is doing because Italy built their grid on gas...
Of course, would the latter happen, political actions would be done before people freeze. It will be unpredictable what the would be - allow fossil fuels "temporarily" or order datacenters to shut down during dunkelflaute? Interesting times (I would prefer less interesting times).
Generally speaking cap and trade is the most sure way to reduce emissions (emissions drop exactly at the pace the CAP drop annually) and the most cost-effective way also - the TRADE part ensures emissions are cut first by those who it easiest, while hard-to-decarbonize sectors have most time to sort their plan.
The only problem is "carbon leakage" where co2 emissions simply move to asshole countries like USA and China that do not utilize cap-and-trade. That should be dealt with hefty carbon tariffs. Oh wait, even china is building their own cap-and-trade system. Well, anyways, tariffs against the climate assholes.
For example, gas heating is exempt from the EU carbon trade, so people are encouraged to use that rather than electric heating. In countries like Germany, gas heating is popular largely for tax reasons.
carbon leakage is mostly industrial and data centers (why do so many europeans run code at us-east-1 ?)
It's great for marketing and, you're right, that's why they are doing it but the reason it's good for marketing is that their customers care about the environment. This is the exact invisible hand mechanism in action. It's their preferences changing the behavior of one of the biggest corporations in the world and all they can do is act like it doesn't count because they don't actually care
Also, unlike solar and wind, nuclear is a very important anchor source to prevent fossil fuel use in the grid. Solar and wind only absorb growth but so far have never managed to actually compete on baseload power requirements.
Surely a nuclear reactor is only economical if you don't have to pay for the cost of a Chernobyl type event. Did they assess the costs? Surely they played the costs down as the public is going to pay for the consequences. Shrug. It's so easy to do business this way. The fins also expose themselves to blackmail by an adversarial neighbor.
But if this is all well reasoned we can now start building data centers on the south pole and dump the nuclear waste where no one notices it. Because that's the fumbling policy relied on. The people are being played for fools.
2. Chernobyl nuclear plant was very poor copy of safe by design nuclear plant. It had critical flaw in carbon based proton catching mechanism
3. Closed zone is currently habitable (except Sarcophagus area). You'll receive much higher radiation dose simply by flying to Norway. Nature is returning there, there're plans to repopulate it
4. This was in Soviet Union and power plant was "public". Most of the power plant in EU is public if not every single one. I don't have exact information on this topic
Please do not treat entire technology, which is safe, as a threat simply because some greedy, uneducated people from the past wanted better position and paid ultimate price for it
We don't have greedy, uneducated people who want better positions now?
His skin was falling from body while he was still breathing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
In terms of loss of life Chernobyl disaster is comparable to Bhopal disaster (at least 3,787 over 16,000 claimed deaths), caused by Methyl isocyanate leak from the storage tank. A combination of poorly-maintained or non-functional facilities, a disregard of safety standards, and an under-trained workforce made it possible for water to leak into the MIC tanks in the absence of properly working safety systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
Chernobyl disaster was caused by a combination of reactor design error and operator error. After this errors have been fixed (different nuclear fuel composition, modern monitoring and controlling equipment, improved operator training and procedures) there are still 7 operational RBMK in Russia. (The same reactor type as Chernobyl)
" Death rates are measured based on deaths from accidents and air pollution per terawatt-hour of electricity. "
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...